The new version (1.3) released today is a universal binary, features some performance tweaks to improve the app’s speed and fixes some issues with Jabber accounts. It also offers support for multiple IM accounts in its Address Book view.

The interface has been reworked:

With Adium Book you can add Adium contacts to Address Book or update the information on an Address Book card using data from Adium.

It allows full text search of Adium contacts and Address Book and provides a range of reports, among them a listing of contacts without pictures, contacts in Adium but not in Address Book or a listing of contacts by IM service.

Adium book is donation-ware and is available from the Adium Extra’s web site or the developer’s webs site .not apple mail, adium, address book, contacts, IM, chat, universal, reports, instant messagingSimilar Posts:

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Late last year Business Week published an article on how email is in its death-throes and Stowe Boyd later confirmed that it is all true — email is on its last legs.

Tebbutt has a more nuanced view. He sees the value of wikis, IM and other collaborative tools as ways of freeing us from the avalanche of “Reply All” emails that whizz around the average office, described by Ross Mayfield of Socialtext as “occupational spam”.

He argues that greater use of these tools doesn’t mean the end of email. On the contrary, he says, it will free email up:

In fact, email could well be heading for a renaissance as a person-to-person communication tool. Exactly what it was invented for.

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The survey of over 1,468 (53% male / 47% female) office workers contains few surprises, although it is interesting to compare the results with similar US studies on email use and gender and email productivity.

Email is the electronic medium of choice. The report found that “more people said they were addicted to email in the workplace than any other medium, with 78% of respondents claiming they couldn’t live without it.”

However, it seems email is not always being used for work-related purposes. UK offices are full of what the report describes as “bad behaviour”:

Professionals aren’t only using email to make corporate deals. 40% use the tool for gossip, 54% for socialising, and 60% for dealing with issues regarding their relationships with coworkers. Men are more likely than women to use email for socialising, whereas women are more likely to use it for gossiping.

The study asked respondents how long they needed to wait for a reply to an email before considering the recipient of the original email rude:

The survey also found that younger respondents were more adventurous in their communication channels than older ones, and males more than females.

In British offices, traditional communication methods remain important: “Leaving aside email for the moment, a high number of respondents rely more heavily on traditional methods of communications…. 29% use both fax and letter each day – although this figure rises the older the respondent.”

Finally the report identified three stereotypes in British workplaces. It’s always fun to think about which category your fellow workers fall in, so here they are:

The OAT (Old Age Technologist)
OATs are not necessarily old in age, but have more dated attitudes towards new communication technologies. OATs realise new technologies are becoming more prevalent in the workplace, but they’re dealing with this change by maintaining their tried and tested ways of communication. OATs are not sure how or why people have taken so readily to ‘new age’ communications tools.

The ESBO (Easily Sociable Behaviour Online)
Very comfortable when using modern communications, ESBOs are as happy text messaging their boss as IM’ing a client or taking part in a video conference. The ESBO zooms through the workday checking emails upwards of 300 times. Some ESBOs love the phone, some hate it, but the critical matter is that IM, text messaging and email have become more important than even their desks.

The StoIC (Slow to Implement Change)
The SToIC follows etiquette rules and doesn’t stray from accepted comfort zones. If there isn’t a generally accepted way of using a new technology the SToIC will avoid it altogether. The SToIC is still using the fax on a regular basis and would rarely consider writing a text message for work purposes.

If you are not sure which one you are, you can take an online survey to find out.

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Among other things, the post points out that email is customisable and tweakable in ways that other modes of online communication are not, that it is universally available and accessible and that people understood what it is and how to use it.

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It is technology — IM, text messaging and email — which he argues is (mostly) to blame:

“it doesn’t matter whether you are reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone’s inane blog — the quality bar is set lower than ever.”

Whether or not you find his argument persuasive, you will enjoy the verbal imagery.

It runs the whole gamut from poetic (“[Email's] speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.”) to the more direct (“… it’s not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It’s important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well…. It’s important to think before you write.”)

I want to believe him. Goodness knows there’s some barely legible stuff out there. But are things really more badder?

I couldn’t shake a niggle from the back of my mind. Then I remembered what it was:

…Two evils, Ignorance and Want of Taste, have produced a Third; I mean the continual Corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely Remedy, will suffer more by the false Refinements of Twenty Years past than it hath been improved in the foregoing Hundred.

— Jonathan Swift, “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue”, The Tatler, 1710.text, email, IM, standards, punctuation, grammar, the good old days, language, technology, Jonathan Swift Similar Posts:

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Users can now see when their Talk buddies are online, save transcripts of their chats as if they were emails and initiate chats with one click, all from the browser interface.

The transition will occur “over the next few weeks” and according to MacWorld will be limited to users of the US English language interface.

Gmail has released an annotated screenshot of the new interface for those who are still waiting:

Click image for a larger copy

Of course, Mail.app users already enjoy integration with iChat and the ability to email themselves transcripts of their chats automatically using Chatalog, but many are welcoming this as “the next logical step in web-based mail” (so the Radioactive Yak ).Gmail, Talk, chat, ichat, web interface, Chatalog, Web 2.0, transcripts, IM, contactsSimilar Posts:

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